Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America

By Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa.

By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469669939

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey is assistant professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history at McGill University, where he holds the William Dawson Chair. He also goes by Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrekor We Oblahii ke Oblayee Mantse.

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CROSS-BORDER COSMOPOLITANS

CROSS-BORDER

COSMOPOLITANS

THE MAKING OF A PAN-AFRICAN

NORTH AMERICA

WENDELL NII LARYEA ADJETEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book is published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2023 Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey

All rights reserved

Designed by Rich Hendel

Set in Miller and Transat

by Jamie McKee, MacKey Composition

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover design by Lindsay Starr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data

Names: Adjetey, Wendell Nii Laryea, author.

Title: Cross-border cosmopolitans : the making of a Pan-African North America / Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022022449 | ISBN 9781469669922 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469672113 (paperback) | ISBN 9781469669939 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Black people—North America—History—20th century. | Black people—Political activity—North America. | Black people—North America—Social conditions—20th century. | Pan-Africanism. | African diaspora.

Classification: LCC E49.2.B53 A45 2023 | DDC 320.54096—dc23/eng/20220629

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022449

For

Osabu

(Osabu Olaitei, Ogidigidi, Gbègbèètégbèèté,

Katamansu Ta Tsè, Nuunko-Nuunko, Bo chukuò ni Bo nyagãa)

and

Atrékor Wé

for witnessing Osabu’s everlasting flame and

in whose hearts and minds Osabu kindled a spirit for

resisting injustice and surviving improbable odds.

Hiao! Hiao! Hiao!

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. North America: A Transnational, Global Zone, 1900–1919

PART ONE

1. The Messianic Moment, 1919–1931

2. Borderlands Blues, 1930–1950

3. Civil Rights or Human Rights? 1950–1967

PART TWO

4. Immigration, Black Power, and Draft Resisters

5. The Mind of the State

6. Cold Wars, Hot Wars

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

J. R. B. Whitney and Ada Kelly Whitney

Letter from Sir Edmund Walker

Letter from Ontario prime minister Sir William Hearst

Anna H. Jones, Oberlin class of 1875

Robert Paris Edwards, A Credit to My Race

Always Go by Tunnel

Joe Louis’s gloves

Beulah Cuzzens, circa 1927

Earle A. Cuzzens

Juanita Corinne DeShield

Yenwith Kelly Whitney

Allan Malcolm Morrison

Gilbert St. Elmo Gillie Heron

Daniel Grafton Hill III

Hill family

Toronto Woman Calls Ghana in Appeal to Save Negro

Ghanaian prime minister meeting Canadian prime minister

Cabinet of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah

Officers of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, circa 1968

Defense Captain Warren Hart serves breakfast to schoolchildren, circa 1969

Purged members of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party

MAPS

North America

Great Lakes Cities, States, and Provinces

Atlantic Triangle

Caribbean Basin

TABLES

2.1 Permanent U.S. Immigration to Canada

2.2 Massachusetts Census Tracts

2.3 Foreign-Born in Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Ohio Census Tracts

2.4 Foreign-Born in Wayne County (Mich.) Census Tract

2.5 Foreign-Born in Cook County (Chicago, Ill.) Census Tract

2.6 Foreign-Born in Ohio Census Tracts

2.7 Foreign-Born in New York Counties: Erie, Monroe, New York, and Onondaga

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When you hail from neocolonial Africa’s laboring masses for whom material security and dignity are too often a mirage, a life in the academy underscores the many hands and good graces that have facilitated your social mobility. When graduating from junior high school is the equivalent of your parents’ formal education, because of basic human rights denied them under colonialism and neocolonialism—or when English is not your parental tongue in an English-speaking birth country, let alone your adopted country—it becomes exceptionally difficult to imagine that which is humanly possible. My story, therefore, is a testament to the power of the proverbial African village. African peoples are a cosmopolitan people, so my village included not only Gã loved ones and elders but also kindred spirits from other parts of Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States, of different shades and backgrounds. Many non-Africans also aided me on my journey.

My debts, indeed, are too many to enumerate. But I try.

The anonymous peer reviewers have been more of a blessing than I anticipated. They vetted the manuscript in a timely manner, found typos, and alerted me to gaps in my writing. Their overall suggestions, critiques, and enthusiasm with the manuscript gave me additional confidence in the project’s value. The readers, in fact, encouraged me to write boldly in terms of the manuscript’s interventions. It was invaluable for me to receive this type of advice from seasoned historians.

The manuscript would not have made it to peer review in July 2021 if my McGill University colleagues and interlocutors at other institutions had not organized a pivotal workshop for me in May. Lorenz Lüthi, Catherine Lu, Jason Opal, Jim Walker, Joshua Guild, and Russell Rickford read the manuscript closely and provided insightful chapter-by-chapter comments. These six senior scholars, whose research and writing span diverse fields, from global history and theories of political justice to ethnic history and Black Power, brought rich perspectives that complemented the scope and ambition of my manuscript. They inspired me to seize my authorial voice.

I owe a special note of thanks to my colleague Lorenz Lüthi. Since I arrived at McGill in August 2019, Lorenz has gone above and beyond to make me feel welcomed, valued, and supported as an untenured faculty member. His foresight and gentle—yet persistent—reminders that a manuscript workshop would help me immensely and that he would take on the task of organizing one has been one of the defining experiences of my young career in the professoriate. Although he had just completed his own book—an 800-page urtext titled Cold Wars—his kindness, selflessness, and professionalism have taught me a significant lesson where academic citizenship is concerned and what it means to hold the title of senior colleague.

Similarly, Catherine Lu has been a steadfast advocate, colleague, and friend. She is also a talented political scientist and institution builder. We discovered that one of her doctoral advisors at the University of Toronto, David A. Welch, was one of my undergraduate champions and mentors and the advisor of my senior thesis on child soldiers in West Africa.

Adelle Blackett is another stalwart. Her wisdom, advocacy, and love for community are inspiring. She is not only a pioneering legal scholar but also one who has had an outsize impact on making the Canadian academy more equitable. Adelle, in fact, is responsible for laying the groundwork that led to McGill recruiting me in December 2018.

My New Haven, Connecticut, dream team remains undefeated. Glenda Gilmore, a master historian—and, frankly, someone who should seriously consider publishing a guidebook on the art of training historians—read every chapter of the manuscript at least twice and provided copious feedback. Her sharp eye for detail and penchant for good writing meant that I received helpful pointers to tighten my prose. She showed patience and poise throughout. G. G. has been a major source of inspiration and mentorship. Gerald Jaynes, an economist by training, is not only a gifted social scientist but also a skillful humanist whose interdisciplinary appreciation of U.S. history and the African American experience helped me see the big picture of this project and piece together what, at times, seemed like disparate threads. Gerry reread chapters and provided thoughtful suggestions. Equally supportive was Matthew Jacobson, who also read parts of the manuscript and shared incisive advice that I, in my inexperience, was only too glad to receive. I have said it once, and I will say it again: M. J. sees U.S. history as a high-definition, three-dimensional process. Enthusiastic support and helpful recommendations for the manuscript also came from Jonathan Holloway and Jay Gitlin. Jonathan identified gaps in my analysis, and Jay’s scholarship on French North America gave me ideas on how to formulate a framework of African North America. These scholars not only facilitated my admission to Yale in August 2012 but also ensured, once I arrived in New Haven, my thriving.

At McGill, my colleagues in the Department of History and Classical Studies and other parts of the university have played an integral role in my progress. My previous chair, Jason Opal, ensured that my teaching and service commitments did not delay completion of my manuscript. Jason’s wisdom and overall support have been invaluable. My current chair, Kate Desbarats, has also been uplifting. My late colleague Jarrett Rudy embodied kindness and collegiality. Comrades in the Dr. Kenneth Melville McGill Black Faculty and Staff Caucus also deserve praise for their tireless efforts to make McGill a more equitable institution. My students inspire me with their intellect, eagerness to learn, and compassion for humanity.

Other sources of support, such as professional development and archival funding, aided the research of this manuscript and my scholarship at different stages. A grant from McGill’s Faculty of Arts acting dean Jim Engle-Warnick provided modest honoraria to the manuscript workshop participants as a token of my appreciation. Start-up research money from McGill allowed me to complete last-minute archival trips and offset research-related expenses. From 2016 to 2019, I enjoyed various fellowships and made progress on my writing at Massey College, University of Toronto; the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the History Section at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. I received funding from various benefactors at Yale University, most notably the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of History, and the Department of African American Studies. Other research support came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation; the Marcus Garvey Foundation; the German Historical Institute and Bosch Foundation Fellowship in Archival Research; and the University of Pennsylvania Social Science and Policy Forum Fellowship in Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods.

I could not have dreamed of a better publisher for my first book than the University of North Carolina Press. My editor, Brandon Proia, is wise, talented, and empathetic. Brandon was helpful at every stage, reading the manuscript multiple times and providing helpful line edits. His resourcefulness and responsiveness made a demanding process during a global pandemic less challenging and sometimes fun. Countless others at the press deserve enormous praise, too, from marketing and publicity to copy editing to cartography to the arts department.

Archives and knowledgeable archivists throughout the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom helped me locate primary sources, and when I could not visit, they scanned materials for me. Securing declassified intelligence documents in a relatively timely manner starting in 2015 from the National Archives and Records Administration’s Freedom of Information Act and via Library and Archives Canada’s Access to Information and Privacy provided the empirical evidence that substantiates major claims in this book.

I have had the good fortune of meeting leading historians and other scholars who have extended me grace and much support over the past few years. Many commented on parts of my manuscript or complementary works at different stages and offered thoughtful feedback: Malick Ghachem, Kenda Mutongi, Robin Kelley, Winston James, Sarah-Jane Mathieu, Ned Blackhawk, Craig Wilder, Jeff Ravel, Ed Rugemer, Jeff Reitz, Allan Greer, Ted Hewitt, and Christopher Capozzola.

As a Ghanaian Canadian who aspired to pursue doctoral studies in the United States, I corresponded with faculty whose generosity made a real difference in my academic trajectory. Tom Bender, for example, encouraged me to explore fundamental themes in U.S.-Canadian history. I would also like to acknowledge Michele Mitchell, Heather Ann Thompson, Gary Gerstle, Joe McCartin, Marcia Chatelain, Dennis Dickerson, Nico Slate, Maurice Jackson, Danny Walkowitz, and Andrew Needham, to name a few. Although I did not train directly under these senior historians, they have been collegial, generous, and, in many ways, role models of academic excellence and citizenship.

I credit Tera Hunter for introducing me to Joe Trotter. In September 2011, my cousin Bismark (Nii Quaye) and I drove from Toronto to Pittsburgh for me to meet Joe and discuss the doctoral program at Carnegie Mellon University. I was so humbled that a titan in the field agreed to receive me—a stranger, a nobody—like an honored guest. Joe has been such a gentleman, elder, and friend to me. His encouragement and thoughtful feedback on my research are invaluable.

I have admired Michael Gomez from afar for many years. His pioneering work on African peoples in the Atlantic World has influenced my scholarship. Michael’s perceptive feedback on my manuscript has made me a better historian. His reassurance and grace remind me that I have much to pay forward in the profession.

I am also thankful for support that I received from Leah Wright Rigueur, Elizabeth Hinton, J. T. Roane, Huewayne Watson, Adom Getachew, Marcus Hunter, Margaret MacMillan, James T. Campbell, Deb Neill, Randall Hansen, David A. Welch, Karolyn Smardz Frost, the late Michael Stein, Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Holly Guise, Amanda J. Hall, Kaneesha Parsard, Ryan Jobson, Ginny Bales, Ryan Brasseaux, Agustín Rayo, Melissa Nobles, Tom Sugrue, John Skrentny, Jennifer Allen, Elijah Anderson, David Blight, Rodney Cohen, Michelle Nearon, Elizabeth Alexander, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Steve Pitti, David Kastan, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Jackie Goldsby, Crystal Feimster, David Austin, C. Arthur Downes, Lascelles Peabody Small, Paul Winn, Big Al Barker, the late Romain Pitt, Lennox Farrell, Ato Seitu, Dawn Roach Bowen, Philippe Fils-Aimé, Brenda Paris, Francis McLean, Tim Brodhead, Mary Anne Chambers, Nick Chambers, Neil Seeman, Ian McWhinnie, Morris Rosenberg, Vic Young, John Fraser, Claudia Hepburn, Kris Mohan, Etienne Mashuli, Stephen Peel, Michael Stone, Kofi Appenteng, Stuart Shaw, Joe Kwaofio, Julian Ofori, Sue Ruddick, Penny Von Eschen, Earl Lewis, John Minahan, Emily Lichtenstein, Ted Gilman, Michèle Lamont, Helen Clayton, and Tim Colton.

My interest in African peoples in the Atlantic World has evolved over the past decade. But, truly, this evolution began over a decade and a half ago. At the University of Toronto, I enrolled in a Caribbean history course that African Canadianist Sheldon Taylor taught. Incidentally, Taylor was my first and only undergraduate Black professor. In his course, I discovered the symbiotic connection between the Caribbean Basin and the North American mainland due to European imperialism, enslavement of Africans, and the circulation of people and ideas in the twentieth century. Another course on African Canadian history and a senior thesis on the founding fathers and chattel slavery in the United States, also with Taylor, crystallized what I knew intuitively but lacked the vocabulary and the deep historiographical training to articulate: that is, diasporic Africans, because of imperialism and colonialism and their organizing against systems of white domination, linked their struggles in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa. Furthermore, Taylor introduced me to elders, impressed upon me the import of community, and served as an example of what I could achieve as a first-generation immigrant. He taught me that the Black historian must be a sentinel of Black folk. When revising my manuscript, he shared rare archival material from his private collection and always made time to answer questions and contextualize primary sources or refer me to other interlocutors. He also allowed me to read his book manuscript, which gave me a deeper understanding of Black Toronto’s history.

The late Richard Iton, with whom I took an M.A. course at the University of Toronto, sharpened my critiques of U.S. political culture.

The late Robin Winks, an authority on British Commonwealth history, made Black history at Yale a more continental and diasporic enterprise. Although I did not have the pleasure of meeting Winks, his legacy is evident in the world-class advising that I received and the global contours of this book.

My dear friend Jane Anido was one of my biggest cheerleaders. Although she did not live to see this book’s publication, her generosity of spirit, steadfastness, and radiant smile helped me immensely on my scholarly journey. I miss you, J. J. My sisters Lizzy and Zaza and the entire Anido Clan keep J. J.’s memory alive.

Many elders made time to share their experiences on and off the record. Their insights gave me a richer appreciation for the struggles and aspirations of African peoples in the Atlantic World, whether in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the 1920s or Toronto in the 1930s or the postwar Caribbean or the tumultuous U.S.-Canadian borderlands in the 1960s and 1970s.

I am equally grateful to the individuals, archives, and organizations that granted me permission to reprint images in this book. I would like to extend a special appreciation to Fredrika Newton for granting me permission to reprint a rare image from the Black Panther newspaper.

As a child, I could not have imagined writing a book, scholarly or otherwise. Gifted teachers played a decisive role in my academic growth. My fifth-grade teacher, Beverley Kahne Perez, was the first educator to inspire me and to instill in me a love for reading, analysis, and scholastic discipline. Mrs. Perez taught me—a Black boy who had acquired a visceral distaste for school and whom other teachers considered troublesome—that I could achieve the improbable when teachers showed me respect and dignity and recognized my talents.

Had it not been for the deep empathy of and support from my guidance counselor, Peter Hinchcliffe, I am unsure how I would have charted a path out of high school, let alone to postsecondary studies. As a teenager from a poor family whose friends had been involved in a gang war for half of my high school years, the last thought on my mind was achieving good grades. Mr. Hinchcliffe was the consummate high school counselor and teacher. (On 30 October 2021, Mr. Hinchcliffe succumbed to cancer. He had fought valiantly. We had not seen each other since 2004. I yearned to reconnect in person and for him to meet my family. May you find perfect peace, Mr. Hinchcliffe.) Thank you, Joanne Filipic, for keeping Mr. Hinchcliffe’s memory alive.

The Afrocentric, Black-owned Knowledge Bookstore gifted me my first academic scholarship the summer before freshman year. This modest award gave me a much needed confidence boost. Ms. Alison McLean, who kindly agreed to volunteer and advise my high-school senior essay on transatlantic slavery, recommended me.

As a U of T freshman, Pertia Minott advised me to consider pursuing a Ph.D. I am not entirely sure that I knew the meaning of this abbreviation then or what it entailed. She was the first Canadian of African descent whom I knew with a doctorate, so I discerned that her admonishment was genuine.

I told you that my debts are too many to list!

I cannot say enough about African American communities that embraced me and encouraged me over the seven years that I spent in New England and other parts of the country. I felt like a native son, except that I reaped where I had not sown. My dear friends and elders Lisa Monroe, Phyllis and William H. Harris, and Barbara and Curtis Patton know exactly what I mean.

Another source of inspiration are my siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, godchildren, and all my other brothers and sisters in the ’hood and elsewhere who are struggling, dreaming, and working for a safer and just world.

My elder sister Ivy deserves special recognition. She was the first in our family to attend and graduate from high school and the first to obtain a university degree. She embodies strength, courage, decency, and wisdom, like my elder brother Rudy. He is easily one of the best fathers in the world.

My parents have been our strongest bulwark from the jump. Thank you for everything, Mom and Dad. Your sacrifices and love have brought me to this point. Mom, I cherish your supplications and words of counsel for us. Dad, you are the personification of strength, honor, and justice. You have given me the greatest gift in the world: the blessings of our fathers and foremothers. When faced with improbable odds, my ancestors summoned the Spirit of Osabu—indeed, the Spirit of the Ancient One, the Author of Justice and Life’s Mysteries, lè ji Noko yè Djéin—time and time again. They overcame war and famine in the Nile Valley, survived exile in the wilderness, maneuvered hostile nations, and, after their arrival on the Accra Plains in the fifteenth century, resisted the genocidal and seismically disruptive Black Apocalypse—transatlantic slavery. When they founded Teshie as a garrison on the Gulf of Guinea circa 1695 and my patrilineal ancestral war clan Atrékor Wé circa 1696, they imbued both with our credo: No surrender. No retreat. Throughout my childhood and teenage years—and, honestly, to this very day—I have spent countless hours sitting at my father’s feet listening to his deft rendition of Gã narratives. He taught me the meaning of knowledge of history and love of self.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge specifically my kinsmen and kinswomen from Atrékor Wé who also taught me about the art of history. The clan is the braun of Teshie, the pulse of the Klé Musun section (meaning Belly of the Beast; a Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic World riddle), and the heart—or technically the thumb—of the Gã Confederation. They supplemented my dad’s teachings, exposing me to sacred and forbidden Gã, Teshie, and clan knowledge. Yoo’mo Atswei Kpékpélé, for example, brought words from our ancestors. May those words come to pass, and may she have strength and health to enjoy its fruit. It humbles me that my kinsmen and kinswomen’s narration of watershed events from centuries ago, including the names of key actors and landmarks, when cross-referenced with the works of professional scholars, often proved more reliable and accurate. They remind me why the scholar or fact finder must always begin at the source, not the periphery, when seeking historical knowledge. My Yale Ph.D. compares not to what they know empirically and in spirit. Their insights are vast; their command encyclopedic. I have learned and grown much from sitting at their feet listening to our ancient battle songs, names of distinguished generals and high priests, tales of the courage and resourcefulness of our foremothers in a highly militarized and violent Atlantic World, and Gã ethics on divinity, sanctity, humanity, and justice—including grounds for just war against enslavers and territorially expansive empires. They showed me, in sum, that knowledge of Black history—yes, the history of African peoples—is necessary to constructing a blueprint for complete emancipation from systems of anti-Black domination, exploitation, and extermination.

My deceased grandparents also deserve recognition. As a little boy, (my grandmother) Yoo’mo Kutorkor was my best friend. We were inseparable. Yoo’mo Atswei Flanta had a brilliant mind. She also had the heart of a warrior. My grandfathers, Nii Okoe Onukpa and Ataa Gbòmò, whom I did not meet in this earthly realm, I honor you.

Last, but certainly not least, I thank Naa Oyoo and Nii Adjei for their love, encouragement, and patience. In their own unique way, they nudged me toward the finish line. Nii Adjei, may you find purpose and fulfillment in adding to the historical record in words and deeds. Indeed, may you, too, cherish the memory of our ancestors and help safeguard the legacy of your ancestral clan Atrékor Wé. For honoring your promise and for arriving not a second too late, Daddy is so grateful for and proud of you—you Little Grizzly Bear.

The merits of this book belong to those who helped me on my journey and have entered my African village or bridged theirs to mine as acts of human solidarity. Pardon me for those whom I have forgotten to mention. The demerits of this book, however, are mine alone.

CROSS-BORDER COSMOPOLITANS

North America

INTRODUCTION

NORTH AMERICA

A TRANSNATIONAL, GLOBAL ZONE, 1900–1919

She was a plain-looking little colored girl. Coming from Canada, that rugged land where Apex and Anti-kink are indispensable necessities, but dutiable luxuries, her coarse black hair was ‘bad,’ wrote Juanita DeShield of the protagonist in her 1936 short story. Although she concealed her own experience within a sensationalized third-person narrative, the 1934 bus trip from Montreal to New York City that DeShield recounted was real, partly lingering on the physical lineaments of race and difference that she knew intimately. Her broad flat nose and thick red lips were an unusual complement to her milky-white complexion. Her hands and eyes seemed not to belong to her at all, she admitted. But her eyes, DeShield continued, large and expressive, registered her every thought, and when she was excited, rolled like Eddie Cantor’s.¹ Her disapproval of cosmetic goods that bleached melanated skin and Europeanized African hair—by-products of what the scholar Cedric Robinson would later call racial capitalism—not to mention her reference to entertainer Eddie Cantor, who performed in blackface, signified DeShield’s acute racial consciousness and awareness of societal contradictions and dehumanization of the Black body.²

Born 30 April 1913 in Montreal, Quebec, Juanita Corinne DeShield came of age in North America (Turtle Island), where the diasporic African population had been rapidly intermingling since the turn of the century. Anti-Black racial terrorism, urbanization, industrialization and demand for cheap labor, racial awakening, adventure, and ecological factors pushed and pulled African descendants around the continent. DeShield’s community comprised Garveyites and other race-conscious Black people, some Canadian-born, others from the Caribbean Basin and the United States. Her paternal aunt, Anne, belonged to Montreal’s Colored Women’s Club, a social network and civic bulwark that African American ladies founded circa 1902 when their spouses migrated north to work as sleeping car porters.³ DeShield’s parents and elders provided her with an armor of race pride to blunt the racist and sexist expectations of the dominant society. By her early twenties, as a McGill University undergraduate, DeShield had become a prominent African Canadian youth organizer, pacifist, and anti-fascist cross-border activist. To escape the worst of the Great Depression, the promising intellectual and budding artist moved to Harlem in 1934, where she roomed with relatives, took elocution lessons, wrote about race and militarism, sometimes published, and begrudgingly found work performing domestic chores in the Bronx.⁴

DeShield’s reflections on her place within the U.S.-Canadian landmass provide a window into the borderlands, transnational world of diasporic Africans. Hers was a widely shared understanding of marginalization. How do we explain a people whose migrations, labor, family ties, social aspirations, politics, and revolutionary struggle transcended the boundaries of empires and states? How do we reconcile their alienation and emigration from these polities when their presence over generations was foundational to the socioeconomic order? To comprehend this contradictory existence, historians must capture the complexities and multidimensionalities of a people who lived on the borderlands of society, racially subordinated and subjugated, often internally displaced, and unable to enjoy the fruits of citizenship. In the absence of viable African repatriation, many found a home by imagining and forging diasporic and transnational communities that spanned the United States, Canada, the Caribbean Basin, and Africa.⁵

This book maps racial formation and self-determination among North America’s mixed Black population of African Americans, African Canadians, and African Caribbean peoples from 1900 to 2000.⁶ It provides not only a lexicon that reduces analytical fragmentation, harmonizing the diasporic African experience in the Atlantic World, but also a framework that situates historical actors, ideas, associations, and events within a broad sociopolitical and geographic context. In the words of historians Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, this project places micro analyses into macro systems.⁷ By examining cross-pollination among African peoples and the ways that they navigated the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and sometimes Africa, this intervention—the first of its kind—excavates, recovers, and reconstructs the bones and anatomy of African Diaspora and Atlantic World history. A blend of urban, borderlands, transnational, and global history, this spatial body of knowledge is vital to understanding freedom and alternative notions of citizenship, not to mention a North American mentalité that galvanized twentieth-century African anti-colonialism. For Black people of diverse origins in North America, race—that is, unity of African peoples, fluidity of borders, and resistance to anti-Black domination, exploitation, and extermination—functioned as a point of reference, bridging mechanism, and rallying cry. This backdrop, which constantly reminded African descendants of their disinheritance and Western cupidity, encouraged serial border crossings and freedom linkages that challenged U.S. and Canadian public and foreign policies predicated on anti-blackness.

Diasporic Africans networked, strategized, created organizations, and led movements while traversing North America and the broader Atlantic World—their cross-border, cosmopolitan corridor. They pursued formal and informal ways of achieving a collective liberation that would also end colonial plunder of Africa and exploitation of the Black masses. The combination of Black people’s militant race pride, critiques of imperialism and colonialism, and transatlantic organizing in the twentieth century exposed continental fault lines. Consequently, U.S. and Canadian authorities covertly deployed counterrevolutionary measures in the interwar period and postwar years, particularly the late 1960s through the 1980s, to thwart Black self-determination on the North American mainland, in the Caribbean, and in southern Africa. Considering the worldwide African Diaspora and sheer influence of the Americas on the rise of the Atlantic World, this North American history is, truly, an international and global history of Black self-identification, Black activism, and Black community building and nationhood.

African descendants like DeShield regularly assessed the dynamics that informed their subordination and movement from one racially stratified country to another. Equally important, they appreciated the difficulty of mapping an African conscience and Black body with occasional European traits onto the North American landscape. When Black people in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean pursued cross-border connections and relocation, they not only imagined freedom but also pushed boundaries—literally and figuratively. Indeed, diasporic Africans moved between—and among—worlds. DeShield, for example, spoke English and French fluently, the languages of social groups that were separate from and hostile to each other in Montreal and antagonistic to her own segregated Black community in the city. Mobility and adaptation became processes that avowed their lineage in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, DeShield’s forebears plied the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland as Bermudian whalers and seafarers. Before that, some had lived in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Once in Canada, her grandfather George Morris DeShield, like other Black men, helped build the transcontinental railway in the 1880s on which her father would travel as a sleeping car porter in the early 1900s. As the daughter and granddaughter of nation builders with extensive history in North America, DeShield could articulate the unfolding diasporic and transnational logic that shaped the identities of Black people on the continent. And as a descendant of free and enslaved Africans in the Americas, DeShield, according to the late historian Ira Berlin, was an Atlantic creole who possessed linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.⁸

TOWARD A DISCOURSE OF NORTH AMERICAN PAN-AFRICANISMS

Since the nineteenth century, African American intellectuals have leaned on the diasporic and transnational to articulate a different sort of nation-building project, argued historian Robin D. G. Kelley.⁹ They believed that internationalizing the Black freedom struggle and writing a collective Black history that restored Africa to its rightful place in human civilizations would mitigate centuries of deracination, facilitate social and physical mobility, strengthen communal bonds, and inspire individual and collective freedom. For diasporic Africans, specifically African North Americans—African Americans, African Canadians, and African Caribbean peoples—this nation-building project was inextricably tied to Pan-Africanisms, a vision that Black people articulated and manifested to different degrees.¹⁰ They looked beyond colonies, unitary states, and empires to forge global Black nationhood.¹¹ Black people imagined and aspired to create an African World.

This book, as a result, focuses on the twentieth century, an era that witnessed large migrations, frequent border crossings, and seismic developments in local and global Black organizing against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. This organizing triggered reactionary national and international policies that sought to maintain systems of anti-Black domination. Movements like Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1910s and 1920s, building on turn-of-the-century efforts to establish an autonomous Black cosmos, provided African North Americans and other Black people with a vocabulary, consciousness, political education, and zeal to pursue liberation.¹² Operating within informal and formal structures, transnational actors crisscrossed the U.S.-Canadian border, the Americas, and the Atlantic Ocean during the twentieth century to forge freedom linkages among African peoples. They include African Canadian educator and socialite extraordinaire Beulah Cuzzens; African American founder of African Liberation Day Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller); African Caribbean activist Rosie Douglas, who secured financing for left-leaning African rebel groups in the 1980s and 1990s; and countless workers, hustlers, athletes, musicians, reformists, and revolutionaries.

Pan-Africanisms illuminate the racial formation, migrations, community building, and freedom struggles of twentieth-century diasporic Africans who moved among the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean Basin. Sometimes, these African North Americans organized on the African continent, but they fought always for a worldwide community. The uppercase Pan-Africanism and lowercase pan-Africanism constitute what I call Pan-Africanisms. The late George Shepperson, pioneering British historian of the African Diaspora, posited that Pan-Africanism entailed a formal or recognizable movement for national self-determination and cooperation in Africa and its diaspora (or diasporas), such as the watershed 1900 Pan-African Conference or the Pan-African Congresses, which began in 1919.¹³ Black studies scholar Kwame Nantambu called this goal Pan-African nationalism.¹⁴ In other words, Pan-Africanism transcended the ethno-territorial state configuration so common throughout precolonial Africa. It also elevated and integrated aspects of nationalism, sovereignty, and other state principles from the Westphalian model.¹⁵ That Europeans had arbitrarily demarcated the boundaries of African colonies, which newly independent states inherited without addressing long-standing intergroup grievances, imperiled notions of sovereignty and self-determination, essential components of Pan-Africanism.¹⁶ Nonetheless, leading Pan-Africanist statesmen of the twentieth century did not envision the state as the supreme political entity in their formulation of Pan-Africanism, which is why formal Pan-Africanism aspired to achieve a federation or confederation of self-determinative African and diasporic states.¹⁷ For these reasons, I consider (unlike Shepperson and other historians) Marcus Garvey’s UNIA—which first showed signs of global promise in 1917 within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands with its petitions to the League of Nations in the 1920s and efforts to establish a United States of Africa that would serve as a beachhead and protector of all Black peoples—an exemplary Pan-African movement.¹⁸ Similarly, African Liberation Day agitation in U.S., Canadian, and Eastern Caribbean cities, which mobilized material and moral support to aid anti-colonial struggles in southern Africa starting in 1972, is another example of Pan-Africanism.

I define pan-Africanism as solidarity based on Black racial and cultural consciousness, social mobilization against exploitation and domination, and control over community resources. As an organizing principle, pan-Africanism is less concerned with the creation of self-governing Black states that share power with and partly derive authority from a centralized or decentralized supranational structure. Theorists and rank-and-file activists considered Pan-Africanism and pan-Africanism not only mutually reinforcing objectives—there was a strong grass-tops and grassroots dynamic—but also necessary worldviews in a centuries-old global order that sought perpetual domination of Black people and exploitation of Africa. In fact, twentieth-century Pan-Africanisms in North America organically synchronized phenomena that scholars call social and cultural history (or history from below) and political and intellectual history (or history from above). As the martyred Guyanese Pan-Africanist intellectual and revolutionary Walter Rodney explained about Pan-Africanisms, Unity is created in the struggle and is so much the more valid because it is created in struggle.¹⁹

Pan-Africanisms denote a language of liberation, observed the writer Aminah Wallace.²⁰ More than rhetoric, Pan-Africanisms, specifically the orthodox variety, with a revolutionary race-first requisite, demanded racial redemption from the degradation to which imperialism and colonialism reduced Black people in Africa, the Americas, and other jurisdictions where a critical mass of African descendants dwelled.²¹ Pan-Africanisms, in fact, predicted a glorious destiny for Black people, because ebony-hued Nilotic Africans and their civilizations in antiquity had no rivals in the known world. Those who influenced Pan-Africanisms’ underlining ideas ranged from intellectuals to common folk who treasured African or Black history and understood the genocidal nature of imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of anti-Black intrusions into Africa. On balance, crossing a border in and of itself did not imply a language of liberation or pan-Africanism.²² However, awareness of a global Black community in which members could trace their ancestry to Africa, insight that imperialism and colonialism created a common enemy for all Black people, and fighting for liberation and autonomous Black states that would work together constituted Pan-Africanisms. Knowledge that Black people transcended the imaginary borders of empires and states mostly as a legacy of enslavement and conquest in the New and Old Worlds also affirmed Pan-Africanisms. According to Audley Queen Mother Moore, the Louisiana-born Garveyite and an architect behind the Republic of New Afrika, which African American revolutionaries founded in 1968, I don’t pay those borders no mind at all where a global Black community is concerned.²³

Not all historical actors who subscribed to the tenets of Pan-Africanisms explicitly cited this nomenclature when describing themselves or their motivations. Various euphemisms served to evoke the spirit of Pan-Africanisms. Some diasporic Africans, as early as the eighteenth century, began appropriating the noun Ethiopian from the King James Bible, which, in ancient Greek, meant a Black person or Africa. This identifier catalyzed the revanchist and messianic movement called Ethiopianism, a prophecy-driven racial redemption of Africa and its Black inhabitants. Since the nineteenth century, other adherents of Pan-Africanisms spoke of Africa for the Africans.²⁴ By the twentieth century—and in addition to Ethiopianism and demands of Africa for the Africans—some used colloquialism to invoke Pan-Africanisms. Barbadian Donald Moore, who immigrated to Canada by way of New York City in 1913 and was a founding member of the Toronto division of the UNIA in 1919, said that British West Indians described pan-Africanism as brothers of the skin.²⁵

Most diasporic Africans associated pan-Africanism or pan-Negroism, in part, with a fraternal and sororal racial identity and shared African heritage. Pan-Africanisms, however, meant more than racial consciousness and fleeting camaraderie based on melanin. Put simply, Pan-Africanisms implied that African peoples the world over—many of whom professed a sacred connection to the Creator and ancestral realm, which influenced their outlook on the spiritual, physical, and material—had a responsibility and an inalienable right to organize, retake power from their subjugators, and create self-sufficient, interdependent homes and communities, small and large, local and global. In this vein, Pan-Africanisms encompassed Black Nationalisms and Black Power and overlapped Black Internationalisms.²⁶ Pan-Africanisms epitomized subtle and at times audacious attempts to resist exploitation and expand the possibilities of Black freedom—dynamic and contested endeavors that evolved generationally.

Twentieth-century Black freedom struggles in North America primarily entailed Pan-Africanisms. And scholars cannot write this history in the fullness of its complexities, let alone grasp the dynamics that helped spark African anti-colonialism, without scrutinizing African North America. Such intervention requires analyses of the ways that African Americans interacted and collaborated with African Canadians and African Caribbean peoples, how these three groups engaged continental Africans, and the importance of geography where borders, transnationalism, and diaspora are concerned. A case in point: Henry Sylvester Williams, the Trinidadian lawyer—who trained at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, from 1893 to 1895 and was that law school’s first Black student—convened from 22 to 24 July 1900 the inaugural Pan-African Conference in London, England. Before crossing the border into Canada, Williams had struggled to find opportunity in New York City around 1891–92. By decade’s end, the astute Trinidadian had coined the phrase Pan-Africanism and began organizing on a global scale. He soon became the first Black lawyer in South Africa, where his defense of native rights from 1903 to 1905 precipitated the African National Congress. At the 1900 conference, Williams’s comrade Jamaican-born Rev. Henry B. Brown, whom he had befriended during his Canadian sojourn, represented Lower Canada (Quebec and parts of Eastern Canada after 1841), serving as vice president and one of thirty delegates.²⁷ This anti-colonial organizing among African peoples would become more worrisome for the U.S. government and European empires.

The Canadian-born Anna H. Jones, principal of Ohio’s Wilberforce University, also attended the 1900 conference. She delivered a lecture titled The Preservation of Race Individuality. In 1852, Anna Jones’s African American father, James Monroe Jones, relocated to Chatham, Canada West (Ontario after 1867), where his daughter was born in 1855. He became a talented artisan who briefly served as a gunsmith for the white revolutionary abolitionist John Brown. In fact, James Monroe was one of the finest gunsmiths in North America. He was among a group of Black delegates who hosted Brown when he visited Chatham in 1858 to plot his raid on Harpers Ferry.²⁸ Black liberation—whether moderate or revolutionary—was intergenerational, international, and intercontinental.

Other notable African North American delegates contributed to the global 1900 Pan-African Conference in London. One of the first delegates to speak was C. W. French of Saint Kitts, with his presentation Conditions Favoring a High Standard of African Humanity.²⁹ Haitian diplomat and intellectual Benito Sylvain attended the conference on behalf of both Haiti and Abyssinia (Ethiopia), whose army had trounced Italian imperial forces at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. Sylvain titled his address The Necessary Concord to Be Established between Native Races and European Colonists. Participants planned to host Pan-African Congresses biannually, hoping to meet in a European or U.S. city in 1902 and Haiti in 1904 to celebrate the centennial of the founding of Haiti and conclusion of the Haitian Revolution.³⁰ W. E. B. Du Bois, who was partly of Haitian ancestry, chaired the conference’s Committee on the Address. It was on this committee that Du Bois—who, in 1897, touted African American contributions to Pan-Negroism—prophesied, The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.³¹ Black intellectuals’ reflections on global geopolitics and their travels in North America, Africa, and Europe sharpened their analyses of power and exploitation—imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, racial stratification, ethno-racial nationalism, and nation building.

The Pan-African Conference in London demonstrated the endurance of the Atlantic triangle: Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Having studied and traveled in Europe in the late nineteenth century, Williams and Du Bois drew lessons from currents of Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, and Pan-Hispanism—what historian Raymond L. Buell called pan-nationalism—emanating from the region.³² In the wake of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, a gathering of European powers that further entrenched their colonization of Africa, Black intellectuals saw the handwriting on the wall and interpreted what it foreshadowed for the coming century. As the late Africanist Isidore Okpewho averred, this Scramble for Africa, which inspired planning of the Pan-African Conference, was a corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Antebellum U.S. foreign policy meant to limit European domination of lands in the Americas on which mostly African descendants toiled.³³ Even if they wished to meddle, western Europeans’ colonization and plunder of Africa in the 1870s nullified any rebuke of white nationalism’s revitalization in the Reconstruction South.³⁴

The 1900 conference shaped the trajectory of civil and human rights advocacy in African North America and global Black resistance against imperialism and colonialism. On the mainland, it underscored the fluidity of the U.S.-Canadian border. In 1905, for example, Du Bois and twenty-eight African American men gathered near the iconic Niagara Falls in Fort Erie, Ontario, a terminus of the Underground Railroad less than ten miles from Buffalo, New York. The following year, both men and women organizers converged on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where John Brown had led a raid in October 1859 that helped trigger the U.S. Civil War. These discreet meetings—or, as the founders called it, the Niagara Movement—jump-started the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. From its inception, the NAACP included a Pan-African Department, signaling the Niagara Movement’s cross-border, continental, hemispheric, and transatlantic aspirations.³⁵ Thus, when Haiti sought support in 1908 and 1909 to invigorate its Pan-African agenda, Haitian statesman Benito Sylvain fundraised in Canada and the United States. Requesting assistance from African Americans through Du Bois, a torchbearer of Pan-Africanisms, Sylvain affirmed the aspirations of Haitians and their diasporic compatriots: "the complete emancipation of our Race."³⁶ Furthermore, the 1900 Pan-African Conference provided Du Bois with the blueprint for his numerous Pan-African Congresses. He spearheaded the initial one in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, which he could not have accomplished without backing from the British Columbia–born Ida Gibbs Hunt, his brilliant anti-imperialist co-organizer. Hunt was of African American parentage and one of the foremost Pan-Africanist women of her generation.³⁷

That Black people sought and cultivated connections across the U.S.-Canadian border decade by decade shows that North American Pan-Africanisms pivoted on serial cross-border migrations and belief in the oneness of African peoples to achieve full freedom from white domination. When Ohioan Joseph Robert Burke J. R. B. Whitney entered Ontario circa 1909–10, he came, like others before and after, in search of racial progress. Whitney might also have been searching for a new beginning.³⁸ Despite the racist 1910 Immigration Act, the few thousand African Americans who entered Canada in the 1910s—or the many thousands more whom border officials denied entry—illustrated that the Great Migration’s first wave extended beyond the industrial U.S. North. From 1914 to 1919, Whitney, a senior member of Toronto’s Prince Hall Freemasons’ Eureka Lodge No. 20, was the most influential Race Man in Canada. In an era when the best-educated Black men in Canadian society could find gainful employment only as sleeping car porters, Whitney worked as an administrator for the Northern Ontario Railway. He also owned his Toronto home.³⁹ In December 1914, Whitney launched the Canadian Observer, the national paper of record for the race.⁴⁰ Nearly one year later, he exchanged correspondence with the minister of militia and defense, seeking federal authorization to muster an all-Black platoon with a Black captain. There is nothing in the world to stop them, replied Minister Sam Hughes, that is, except rampant anti-blackness throughout the armed forces and empire.⁴¹ Indeed, Whitney’s eloquent editorials, organizing of African Canadians, and ambassadorship to the white establishment helped break the unofficial color bar against Black enlistment in the Great War.⁴² Nevertheless, the Canadian Expeditionary Forces, like its U.S. equivalent, remained a Jim Crow fighting unit that tried to relegate most Black servicemen to servile occupations.⁴³

Race consciousness and community mobilization during the First World War crystallized ethno-racial nationalisms of sorts in North America. In certain situations, this agitation generated more questions than answers, such as the African Canadian experience.⁴⁴ For instance, Whitney occasionally articulated the importance of Black racial pride to white Canadian elites, most notably Sir Edmund Walker, president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, and fellow high-ranking Freemason.⁴⁵ Having heard the grumblings of ethno-racial nationalism among various groups in Canada, which would become more urgent after the war, Whitney tried to prepare African Canadians for a world order on the cusp of seismic shifts. At a one-year anniversary rally for the Observer, Walker, an honored guest, cautioned his all-Black audience that group success would take several generations. But he urged them to embrace race pride, because no people or nation, he reasoned, could aspire to organize itself and achieve power without it. Moreover, a race that knew its history and the crucibles that it had overcome—he cited North American slavery—was not only a potent race but also one that was guaranteeing its survival.⁴⁶ A reverend of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in attendance said Walker’s words fell on good soil. The reverend felt very proud of my people … Africans.⁴⁷ Why would a scion and sentinel of the British Empire encourage this sentiment—considering the centrality of Black pride, in addition to knowledge of Black and African history—and in doing so fan Black revolutionary flames in the Atlantic World?

Before enjoying prominence as a banking baron in the Montreal–Toronto–New York City–Washington, D.C., corridor and as a fine arts patron at the turn of the century, Walker had come from humble beginnings in rural southwestern Ontario. One of the most skillful financiers in the British Empire, his wide-ranging interests included Black history, as evidenced by his correspondence with Carter G. Woodson and life membership in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History that Woodson had founded and led starting in 1915.⁴⁸ Walker’s affinity for exceptional Black men like Whitney and Woodson, however, was not tantamount to a desire for equality among racial and gender groups, especially with African descendants, even when he and fellow imperialists advocated Canada’s federation—more like neo-colonization—of the resource-rich British West Indies.⁴⁹ Like most white people, Walker was a social Darwinist who believed in the stratification of races.⁵⁰ Nonetheless, his rapport with and support of Whitney, but more importantly his unusual candor on the greatness that African peoples could achieve if they organized and harnessed the power of Black pride and Black history, betrayed the prevailing racial, classist, and patriarchal mores of white elites everywhere.

Middle-class Black leaders—Woodson, Whitney, and bourgeois spokespersons, too—did not threaten white elites like Walker. In the post-Emancipation years, some Race Men and Race Women learned to temper their demands for complete liberation with rhetoric that sounded like gradualism, such as at the 1900 Pan-African Conference or in civil rights organizations in the Progressive Era. By 1919, a militant Black populace had gone from seeking a revolution of thought, which Whitney encouraged in his newspaper to incite a racial awakening in the war years, to calls for actual revolutionary change.⁵¹ This urgency explains why moderate U.S. and Canadian race programs, like the NAACP’s, failed to generate the same excitement among the masses as the UNIA’s revolutionary agenda. As interracial violence engulfed U.S. cities in what James Weldon Johnson described as the Red Summer of 1919, Whitney returned to his birth country with his newly wedded African Canadian bride, Ada Kelly Whitney. A pioneering educator from Windsor, Ontario, Ada earned her teaching certificate in Detroit circa 1918 and became the first African Canadian school teacher in Windsor. Before leaving Canada in autumn 1919, however, J. R. B. Whitney secured two letters of recommendation—or notes of safe passage, considering widespread anti-Black violence in the United States—from his prominent friends Sir Edmund Walker and Ontario prime minister Sir William Hearst. The couple settled in New York City—the battleground of the New Negro—where they continued their race work, including raising children.⁵²

In many ways, the 1900 Pan-African Conference foreshadowed a tumultuous 1919. That year, a fearless New Negro—frustrated by a regression in global Black liberation—fought urban race wars in the United States while shouts of ethno-racial nationalisms thundered in North America, Versailles, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Despite a placid, middle-class, and bourgeois veneer in the early 1900s, Pan-Africanisms in the Atlantic World originated as urgent, revolutionary, emancipatory objectives of the oppressed masses. And as the talisman of revolutionary and emancipatory Pan-Africanisms, Haitians and Haiti have earned a renowned place in the diasporic African imagination. Nowhere in the Americas—or in the known world—have a group of African peoples done more to advance Pan-Africanisms by vanquishing the spell of foreign preponderance over African minds and on African